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commonly used at the time) – and understood that this strange, as-yet unseen box was the closest thing the Doctor had to a centre of power. In return, Fitz must have picked up something about the customs of the demi-reps and the seraglios. Lisa-Beth notes that he was shocked when he discovered Juliette had only been born in 1769. If he and Juliette compared notes on their journey, then they would have reached the same conclusion Scarlette had already reached… that something about the change in the ‘horizon’ was disturbing Shaktyanda, or disturbing time itself, around London; and that it was this disturbance which had forced the Doctor to ‘walk’ here. Certainly, many of his experiments in the study were directed towards finding a way of bringing his TARDIS to the House undamaged.

Their destination was Cambridge, the start of the great hunt for Sabbath. If the Doctor had known all of the facts – that Juliette’s progress had been monitored for some months by spies within the House itself, and that by the time Fitz’s mission began the Marquis of M_____ had been ripped to pieces and partially eaten by a wild ape in the apparent safety of Cambridge – he might have insisted on going along himself.

Visits

It wasn’t without good reason that the Doctor sent Fitz in search of Sabbath. The Service had been after Sabbath for the last two years, but had eventually ‘decided’ to let him do as he pleased, provided he didn’t disrupt the nation in general. The Doctor evidently felt that his companions had a better chance of getting a lead on him. Or, in short: it was going to take an elemental to do the job. And as tracking Sabbath would involve thinking like Sabbath, Fitz must have seemed the obvious choice. According to Juliette’s later testimony, Fitz did everything he could to adopt the mind-set of a secret service agent. She reported that once, at Cambridge, he bluffed his way into a private archive by claiming to be a Serviceman himself. He even changed his voice when playing this part, although Juliette admitted that his new voice made him sound nothing at all like the Servicemen she’d met at the March ball. On this occasion, Fitz even identified himself with the infamous code-number used by Dr Dee in the Elizabethan era, which must have startled the keepers of the archive. The trip to Cambridge is well documented, as during the weeks he spent there Fitz sent several detailed reports back to Henrietta Street, and the trail began at the University where Sabbath himself was said to have studied.

Sabbath’s rooms at the University still exist. Notably, they’re located in an area remarkably close to the walled-off rooms where the ‘Appalling Club’ met its end, and it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence. Cambridge was a prime recruiting-ground for the British secret service in the eighteenth century, as it would continue to be for the next two hundred years. The Service must have realised something of his potential, either by examining his past records or by Dee’s occult ‘scrying’ process. No doubt some spy in the University arranged for Sabbath to be quartered so close to the ‘secret’ section, in the hope that some of its influence might rub off on him. (It was a common belief in such circles that any ritualist required a ‘place of power’ where he could root himself. Whether this is because such sites were supposed to be outlets for some kind of secret energy, or whether it was just a case of preparing the initiate with the correct kind of ambience, is unclear.)

Fitz and Juliette seem to have had no trouble accessing Sabbath’s old rooms, which were apparently unoccupied during 1782. Although nothing of Sabbath’s remained in the old, musty, wood-lined quarters, there must have been something in the atmosphere which the Doctor’s agents believed they could pick up on. Showing them around the College, in the mistaken belief that Fitz worked for the authorities, was an edgy and balding old member of the University staff: in his letters, Fitz described this Professor as having ‘eyebrows like hedgehogs’ and eyes that seemed determined